Notes on the Assemblage

by Juan Felipe Herrera

The Books We Love in 2016 - The New Yorker

Best Poetry Collections of 2015 - The Washington Post

Best Books 2015: Poetry - Library Journal

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16 Best Poetry Books of 2015 - BuzzFeed Books

Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States and son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in the migrant fields of California.

Exuberant and socially engaged, reflective and healing, this collection of new work from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate is brimming with the wide-open vision and hard-won wisdom of a poet whose life and creative arc have spanned chasms of culture in an endless crossing, dreaming and back again.

"[This year] Juan Felipe Herrera's Notes on the Assemblage has been a ladder of hope …"—Ada Limón, The New Yorker

"Juan Felipe Herrera's family has gone from migrant worker to poet laureate of the United States in one generation. One generation. I am an adamant objector to the Horatio Alger myth of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, but Herrera's story is one of epic American proportions. The heads carved into my own Mount Rushmás would be Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Frida Kahlo, El Chapulín Colorado, Selena, and Juan Felipe Herrera. Notes from the Assemblage further carves out Herrera's place in American letters."—David Tomas Martinez

"At home with field workers, wage slaves, the homeless, little children, old folks, artists, traditionalists, the avant-garde, students, scholars and prisoners, the bilingual Juan Felipe Herrera is the real thing: a populist treasure. He will fulfill his appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate with the same high energy, savvy, passion, compassion, commitment and playfulness that his art and life's have always embodied. Bravo! Bravo!"—Al Young

"While reporters can give you the what, when, and where of a war, a poet with the enormous gifts of Juan Herrera can give you its soul."—Ishmael Reed

"I am proud that Juan Felipe Herrera has been appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, bringing his truthful, beautiful voice to all of us universally. As the first Chicano Laureate, he will empower all diverse cultures."—Janice Mirikitani

"Herrera is … a sometimes hermetic, wildly inventive, always unpredictable poet, whose work commands attention for its style alone … Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed."—The New York Times

"Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be."—National Public Radio

Genres: Poetry, Race, Teaching, Latinx, School

104 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2015

About the author

Juan Felipe Herrera is the only son of Lucha Quintana and Felipe Emilio Herrera; the three were campesinos living from crop to crop on the roads of the San Joaquín Valley, Southern California and the Salinas Valley. Herrera's experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work, such as the children's book Calling the Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats award in 1997. He is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist who draws from real life experiences as well as years of education to inform his work. Community and art has always been part of what has driven Herrera, beginning in the mid-seventies, when he was director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an occupied water tank in Balboa Park converted into an arts space for the community.
Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children in the last decade with twenty-one books in total.

Reviews

[el · Rating 2 out of 5]

i think this was the wrong book to start with as an entry point into juan felipe herrera’s work and i also think that certain poets’ tendency to throw a bunch of interesting words/images at a wall and call it finished does not always make it so. i enjoyed how herrera played with the duality/dichotomy of english + spanish throughout, but that is as much as i can say for this collection.

[Meghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Throughout this collection, Herrera echoes the performance style of the Beat poets. Poems like his “Jackrabbits, Green Onions & Witches Stew” and “Radiante (s)” require the reader to speak the poem out loud, luxuriating in the sounds of each word, much like one would with Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra.” Alongside these performance poems, Herrera also creates poems that must be seen on a page. In these poems, the appearance on the poem makes the words a visual work of art. In his best work in the collection, Herrera combines the visual art with insightful poetic observation.
Herrera expertly walks the delicate balance between political commentary and political preaching. While others may struggle to create artful commentaries on contemporary struggles, Herrera crafts poems like “Ayotzinapa,” “Borderbus,” and “but i was the one that saw it (drone aftermath).” Given Herrera’s title as US Poet Laureate, the political poems of Notes on the Assemblage have a particularly large impact. Connected with a government that has often been criticized for its use of drones, Herrera’s sharp condemnation of drone use has extraordinary heft.

[Benjamin Kass · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some real bangers here, but there are a few that shouldn't have left the notebook. When he's hot, it's as powerful as anything you've read. The fire of jewels like "Ayotzinapa" and "And if the man with the choke-hold" just isn't sustained, though

[Andy Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Juan Felipe Herrera composed Notes on the Assemblage as US Poet Laureate, and through it, he truly does a service to his readers (and his nation) by so beautifully presenting contemporary issues and events that need to be addressed. These are the issues that should be on our mind: on race, on work, on war, on terror, the list goes on and on. Exactly in what ways can we make our world better? Herrera has taken a first step for us. Perhaps, he has even taken a second and third. He raises issues, making sure that we pause and look. There's a sense of knowing that you take away from his poems -- a feeling and meaning that can only be conveyed through poetry.

[Hikari Miya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Juan Felipe Herrera’s book, Notes On the Assemblage, is a solemn and powerful collection of poems that captures the rising tensions and anxieties of social and political actions within the borders of the United States and internationally. He includes prose poems as well as free verse poems, ekphrastic poems, and dialogue poems. His topics include the plight of Hispanics and Mexican immigrants, artwork, and horrific events that have occurred to certain individuals (or groups of individuals). Herrera includes a number of elegies, odes, and other poems that commemorate individuals who have passed, such as José Montoya, Kenji Goto, and the forty-three students that were kidnapped and went missing from Ayotzinapa. Death and suffering are prominently portrayed in Herrera’s poems to highlight them not only as steep prices to pay for political and social injustices, but to also remind readers that they are a very frightening reality for many people and are closer to home than we may think.
Throughout his book, Herrera is often questioning not just what happens, but why things happen; for example, from “And if the man with the choke-hold”: “…and if all the laws are Freedom for you for me why do we/not speak and if that tree stands behind you green with its last two/limbs up/swollen with blood why does it not suffer/why/does it/blossom torches”. Another example is “Borderbus”, in which Spanish and English are combined into a dialogue poem and the sister (in Spanish) asks where they are going, what they did to make border patrol stop them, what the border patrol want, and where they will end up. The questions, which most often go unresolved, are left to the reader to find an answer as they shift focus to the pain and prejudice that surrounds social and political injustice.
Although Herrera writes about turmoil, he also incorporates hope and peace into his poems. At the end of “Tomorrow I Leave to El Paso,” he writes, “a different route to soothe the mind/it is the same one but I am hopeful”. In “Poem by Poem”, he writes, “you have a poem to offer/it is made of action—you must/search for it run”. These lines suggest that the routes that we take throughout life do not matter as much as the mindset; with a positive outlook and willingness to take action, change for peace is more than just possible—it is achievable.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Juan Felipe Herrera’s Notes on the Assemblage is a searingly honest collection on the contemporary human experience. The collection opens with “it can begin with clouds,” a poem and allegory for the cyclical nature of life and history, but it quickly launches into a deep musing of contemporary acts of social injustice, racial oppression, and murder. It is extraordinary that Herrera, who in 2015 was named the first Latino U.S. Poet Laureate since 1937, is able to use his now very public voice to launch readers into a public discourse of contemporary injustices. Notes on the Assemblage is as timely as it is potent. For example, “Ayotzinapa,” which follows right after “it can begin with clouds,” pays homage to the 42 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School who were brutally dismembered and burned by the Guerreros Unidos, a Mexican crime syndicate, in 2014.

Read in succession, “it can begin with clouds” and “Ayotzinapa” set the tone for the rest of the collection: meditative, somber, and harrowing. However, it would not be fair to read Notes on the Assemblage as pure condemnation (e.g. the beheading of Kenji Goto, the Charleston Church shooting) of obvious human rights violations. Rather, Herrera’s collection honors the dead by becoming the place where the world can grieve—unified—because of the breathing space that poetry allows, because of the voice that poetry lends to those who have been silenced. Indeed, Herrera gives the dead a voice, a universal one. In “Borderbus,” he writes, “We are everything hermana / Because we come from everything.”

[Vincent Hiscock]

like Kerouac, Herrera wants to get into IT!-catholic transubstantiation gone zen on the groaning blue note of a bop apocalypse; he listens, sees, riffs, improvises, hoping for the sure stroke of a right line in the right time. punctuation's out the window, so one must speak, intone, or sing these poems to find the syntax, to follow the abrupt turns of thought, which often link through a non sequitor association with a single world and over time reveal the exquisite idiosyncrasies, mental frames, & alternate worlds of Herrera's poetic persona. "Notes" is an unusual book, & it requires time to acquaint oneself w/ this poetry's modes & meanings, its pathos & its humor. but the reward is ample.

Herrera's personal optimism & joy is deeply bound up with the clarity of his ethical life & vision in solidarity w/ terrorized communities here & worldwide (from the US epidemic of extrajudicial police killings of young black men to the massacres of African, Middle Eastern, & South Asian civilians by the US's missile-equipped drones). Herrera writes the dialogue of ordinary people living through such heinous, criminal, & ecocidal events engineered by neoliberal, military invasive policies. in the end, he hopes to teach and model a daily practice of revolution. the collection closes like this:

you have a poem to offer
it is made of action - you must
search for it run

outside and give your life to it
when you find it

[Ally · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an explosive, diverse, and ambitious book of poetry by the newly-ordained US Poet Laureate - the first Latino to ever hold that title. Here is a collection of thirty-eight poems, organized into eight sections; each section takes its name from one of the poems within it. The topics range from USA/Mexico immigration, to the treatment of Black Bodes by our justice system, to works of art and music, to the very makeup of our identities as humans in this world. There is so much to unpack in these poems...I feel that I have just scratched the surface.

The poet is, at times, direct with his language - such as in "Borderbus" when two immigrants have been detained while trying to enter the US. At other times, he plays with the very nature of language and its ability to convey and portray events. An example of this is the poem "but i was the one that saw it (drone aftermath)" where letters and numbers are used to explore the scene of a drone attack on a group of civilians.

The way in which a poet can take a single concrete topic, and translate it into a broader abstract emotion or experience is a continual source of magic for me - why I love to read poetry. This collection is a brilliant example of just such artistry.

[Roya Sabri · Rating 5 out of 5]

As its title suggests, Notes on the Assemblage is a collage of language, imagery, and culture. But the items that compose Herrera’s assemblage do not remain completely distinct. At times, they bleed. Herrera’s poetry models what happens in life. In America, the boundaries between American and Mexican cultures and languages bleed; in the mind, the boundaries between reality and the imagined bleed. What we end up with in Notes on the Assemblage is a book that opens with clouds and closes with a plain reflection on a mass shooting, that reflects on the lives of dishwashers and the paintings of Alfredo Arreguin. It is an assemblage that does away with boxes by cutting them up for their cardboard.

[J.J. Amaworo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here, as always, Herrera defies categorization. At one moment he writes about social issues – the 43 murdered Mexican students, Syria, police killings of African Americans. Then you turn the page and Herrera has become the heir of Wallace Stevens – a trickster, a master of language that dances in the mind. There are also the joyful echoes of Ginsberg and the Beats, ee cummings, and Burciaga.

This collection consists of eight sections, each named for one of the poems therein. The first section, “Ayotzinapa,” is arguably the strongest. “Ayotzinapa” and “And if the man with the choke-hold” are powerful works of social protest. Punctuation-free, they come across as artful streams of consciousness, wails, laments too deeply felt to take a breath. The other great protest poem in this collection, “We Are Remarkably Loud Not Masked,” is narrated by a marcher recalling the names of the murdered – Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray and others – and mixing past (the lost lives) and present (“we march touch hands lean back leap forth”).

Herrera’s social conscience underpins the book but does not overwhelm it. Poems such as “En la media medianoche”/”In the mid of midnight” are paeans to imagery (rumba and chocolate!) and language, and they defy meaning. His command of form across the whole collection includes modernist experimentation, dialogic poems flowing in Spanish and English, odes to the recently deceased, and ekphrastic poetry inspired by the art of Lazo, Albizu and others.

Notes on the Assemblage consolidates Herrera’s reputation as a fearless innovator and a great poet. Bravo, maestro. Ha hecho de nuevo!

This is a shorter version of a review on https://jjawilson.wordpress.com

[Jerry Landry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very powerful and timely collection of poems. Herrera directly addresses national events of the modern day (Ferguson, Mother Emanuel AMC, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, illegal immigration, and others) and puts them in the context of a shared cultural and historical heritage, both good and bad. He breaks down recent tragedies in a way to make them highly personal no matter the reader's background and leaves us with hope that "poem by poem / we can end the violence". His poetry is not just found in the written word but also in the placement of the words - he uses the placement of the words to paint a picture and to serve the theme of his poetry. The most powerful in terms of subject matter for me were "Borderbus", "We Are Remarkably Loud Not Masked", and "Poema por poema/Poem by Poem" while in terms of more philosophical/poetic exploration, I greatly enjoyed "[untitled, unfettered__", "You Throw a Stone", and "i do not know what a painting does". Highly recommended for those who enjoy more contemporary poetic styles.

[RinTinTin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Herrera is a wonderful poet well worthy of the position of US Poet Laureate. I bought this book because I heard him recite Borderbus, among other poems from various points in his career, at a literary festival. It's a good collection, but if you can swing going to a reading of his I highly recommend it - he is immensely charismatic and his poetry takes on a whole new life when read aloud.

[Jennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't get a lot of poetry, but I ~think~ I got at least a handful of the poems in this collection. I thought the imagery was well done and the emotion conveyed well, too.

(I read this because it was included on a B&N list of what Rory Gilmore might be reading now. #nerdalert)

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a huge poetry reader but I picked this up at City Lights. Good politically motivated pieces about racism, immigration, war. My favorite was "you throw a stone."

[ems · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you like public enemy you will like this. at least one will give you chills.

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

When these poems hit, they really hit hard and they stick to you. But most of these poems just sailed right past me, or over me, and didn't stick at all.

Poem by Poem

— in memory of
Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance,
Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor,
Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney,
Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr.,
Rev. Sharonda Singleton, Myra Thompson
Shot and killed while at church.
Charleston, SC (6-18-2015), RIP

poem by poem
we can end the violence
every day after
every other day

9 killed in Charleston, South Carolina
they are not 9 they
are each one
alive
we do not know

you have a poem to offer
it is made of action—you must
search for it run

outside and give your life to it
when you find it walk it
back—blow upon it

carry it taller than the city where you live
when the blood comes down
do not ask if

it is your blood it
is made of
9 drops
honor them
wash them stop them
from falling

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finding "Imagine", Herrera's most recent contribution, I wanted to broaden my view of the United States Poet Laureate and his writing. He is a man of versatility, art, culture, plays, musicals, beyond his use of words.

One of his many interesting presentations are his way he places words on the page.
It requires listening & seeing &
silence silence the bell rings
longtime hermono Bob & I at the parking lot
we leave brown cloth brown cloth
naked spoons naked pots
steam rises from the sink & the view
the view with no one

this follows a description of the two men cooking at a meditation facility in Escondido helping the monks prepare food for the community living there. Personally I had visited this retreat last year and could relive the total serenity his poem promised.

Herrera's art ranges far beyond the printed page; quite an accomplishment.

[William Robison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love many of these poems (notably “song out here”, “[untitled, unfettered_”, “The Soap Factory”, and “Half-Mexican”) for their unique presentation and compelling themes about time and what it means to *be* a person.

At the same time, many of the poems in the first part of this collection fell flat for me. Even spoken aloud, I struggle to make meaning out of them, and this is even after I’ve come to believe that poems give us the meaning that we take out of them. I cannot (right now at least) make any meaning out of several of these poems. Even some of the poems I love are formatted in a way that defies meaning, or have additions that seem random or “scattered”.

Poetry is still the genre I struggle with the most — both with finding the right poetry to read for my preferences and then with crafting meaning out of the texts. Maybe soon I’ll just roll up my sleeves and tackle a chunk of poetry all at once to really immerse myself in the form.

[Simón · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poem (as with another volume I recently read) is the amazing dialogue between two workers at a soap factory. I find Herrera's approach to colloquial speech both natural/dramatic and poetic. I was thinking about the soap factory as a reference to Nazi death camps, but also in light of our current pandemic, and all the ways that dirty/clean break on lines that emphasize homophobia, racism, classism, and misogyny. The workers wonder who needs so much soap, how it's only the bourgeoisie who could possibly use it. I was picturing Chaplin's scenes of modern factory life as well as Lucille Ball's parodies of it. How we're stuck on this conveyor belt of exploitative capitalism with seemingly no escape.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like other reviewers on here, I also found this collection to contain some especially strong poems amid some underwhelming ones. The result: a rather diluted collection. "Half Mexican" is astounding--it calls into question the "in-between" space of occupying multiple racial/cultural identities, as well as what it means to be Mexican (a largely heterogeneous product of colonialism + indigenous) in the first place. However, the last entire section of the book felt mostly like filler. Herrera is certainly a prolific poet, so I'm not at a loss that this is not the first time I've felt this way after completing one of his books.

[Francesca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the important political topics Herrera included (like the Iguala mass kidnapping of students in Mexico). That said I wanted to poems to better reflect their own wanted/needed urgency. The depth and mood in these poems was lacking for me and many I simply skimmed. I did enjoy certain ones like the book’s namesake poem. I think more time was needed on the actual composition of the poems. They are too “train of thought” when to get across their messages they needed more time to be held and crafted.

[Caleb Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

An insightful and rich collection of poems with an uncompromising activist edge. Throughout, Herrera's poetic voice traverses every sort of border and style. After the model of the title, this collection reveals an honest notebook: sometimes scratchy, raw, refined, underlined, bracketed, and bold.

[kathe · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me

[Hope Ash · Rating 3 out of 5]

The kind of book that makes you think “hmm, maybe I’m not very good at interpreting poetry.”
It begs the question of “Is this collection nonsense, or am I just not smart enough to understand?”
Given that Herrera was a Poet Laureate, I’m leaning towards the latter.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this book at my library's used bookstore and bought it largely for the City Lights rep and migrant worker background. This collection ranges from the overtly political and intensely personal and back again -- many appearing in both English and Spanish. Reading it I kept separate lists of the poems that I loved that put a smile on my face and those that I loved that broke my heart into pieces. I ended up writing down too many to list them all here, so I will just list one favorite of each -- "Smiling Dragon" for making me smile and "Borderbus" for making my heart ache.

While I liked some of the more lighthearted poems and loved all the references to the American Southwest -- what I loved most about this collection were the political poems -- those that raged or railed or wept at injustice. These glow with personal conviction and soul.

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry in eight sections with a stand-alone poem. There's a series about people who have passed on, and another about paintings. Herrera has a casual relationship with punctuation, perhaps encountering each other on the street occasionally, but nothing more serious. His leftist politics are on display in some pieces, though not constantly.

Favorites:
"Notes on the Assemblage"
"Hard Hooks that Fold You Down to Your Knees" - for Jack Gilbert (two-time finalist for the poetry Pulitzer)
"In the mid of midnight"

we would live there for a while in that tilted
tiny house by the ocean rising up inside of us
- "song out here"

[Michael Quigg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a random purchase I made from a shopping day and I'm real happy to have this as part of my collection. Herrera's verse has such a pleasant flow, even (in some cases, especially) when dealing with heavy themes such as identity, displacement, barriers, and revolution. I have to especially highlight the chapter "Borderbus," an effective centerpiece to the collection that uses experimental forms, seemingly reaching from the pockets of e.e. cummings, to hit the reader with some honest surprises. One of the better on-the-fly purchases I've ever made.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems that tackle political issues. Poems in both Spanish and English, echoing beat poets.

from And if the man with the choke-hold: "and if looters broke the wall and split / the wine why are they still scorched with thirst and if we march / why does the street divide as we pass by"

from Borderbus: "So many days and we didn't even know where we were headed // I know where we're going / Where we always go / to some detention center to some fingerprinting hall or cube / Some warehouse warehouse after warehouse"

[Theresa Malloy Lemickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poems absolutely blew my mind. They were provocative, thoughtful and so relevant to everything going on in our world right now. This is the first collection of poems by a U.S. Latino poet laureate. His poems range from quirky oddities to tributes to the lives of those lost in police shootings and stories of immigrants crossing the border. They're beautiful and intriguing. It was hard to put it down.

[David Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume of poems is challenging and singular - a worthy book for a poet laureate. The style is a little more free than my usual taste, but most pages benefit from re-reading and the subject matter is fully relevant to any potential reader.

I enjoyed in particular the various ways Spanish and English were blended together in several poems. It's a kind of poetry our more stubborn monoglots could bear to learn from, something that really reflects who this country represents.